Disclaimer: This is a private blog. The thoughts are my own and for my own reading and amusement. I may chose to write in 3rd person format but doesn't mean it is addressed to others. Visitors to my blog can read what they wish but the buck stops there. If I write something stupid, its for me alone. My stupidity! You can't have it :)

Friday, November 22, 2002

Are we aliens...?

Last night I was watching the movie 'Contact' - a story about a little girl who loves radios and grows up to be an astronomer and comes in contact with the messages sent by aliens in a distant star. Sadly I couldn't watch the full movie but as I hit the bed I was wondering if we are aliens.

Ok look at it this way. Ants (my favourite little creatures :p ) are highly civilised. They live in families, colonies, have their own kingdoms and a queen to rule them. They practice slavery and casteism. They recognise the seasons and accordingly store their food. They care for their little ones and even have their own nursery to leave the kids when they go off to work. In some ways they are like what humans were - say about 10,000 years back.

Now when was the last time you actually bent down to speak to these ants? Probably never right? They are insignificant to us. I mean they can't even contact or communicate with us (except for the fact that they know exactly where we are when we go for a picnic). They live in their own two dimensional world oblivious to the fact of how high and wide things can be. A cube of sugar is a diamond mine for them.

And how would they feel if one of us bent down and talked to them? Would they say "Whoa! look its an alien! Run!!" And probably they would go tell rest of the colony and most among them would say "yeah, yeah, shaddup!!". And so the chapter of aliens gets closed in that colony till someone else spots one of us humans again. Some intelligent ants in those colonies might be wondering if there are any other ants - beyond the group of colonies that they know of. When was the last time an ant from India made a contact with ant from Russia? There are ants on every continent but none of them know each other. The distance is too far and their science is limited.

But we know that ants exists all over. Likewise maybe the aliens fly past our earth everyday in their spaceships and a baby alien might say "hey look.. human colony!!". And the papa alien would say "leave em alone - you are already late for school" and they would fly on. And probably the aliens already know where all the humanoid creatures exist on various galaxies. And maybe one professor alien visits earth once in a while to study us. Just like how Suku looks at bugs and studies them. Maybe the ants look at Suku as an alien ;-)